“Monday evening, then,” I had heard the
colonel say, as he followed his guests to the hall.
The curate and his wife.
As I approached the door of the little house in which
the curate had so lately taken up his abode, he saw
me from the window, and before I had had time to knock,
he had opened the door.
“Come in,” he said. “I saw
you coming. Come to my den, and we will have
a pipe together.”
“I have brought some of my favourite cigars,”
I said, “and I want you to try them.”
“With all my heart.”
The room to which he led me was small, but disfigured
with no offensive tidiness. Not a spot of wall
was to be seen for books, and yet there were not many
books after all. We sat for some minutes enjoying
the fragrance of the western incense, without other
communion than that of the clouds we were blowing,
and what I gathered from the walls. For I am
old enough, as I have already confessed, to be getting
long-sighted, and I made use of the gift in reading
the names of the curate’s books, as I had read
those of his brother’s. They were mostly
books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
with a large admixture from the nineteenth, and more
than the usual proportion of the German classics; though,
strange to say, not a single volume of German Theology
could I discover. The curate was the first to
break the silence.
“I find this a very painful cigar,” he
said, with a half laugh.
“I am sorry you don’t like it. Try
another.”
“The cigar is magnificent.”
“Isn’t it thoroughfare, then?”
“Oh yes! the cigar’s all right. I
haven’t smoked such a cigar for more than ten
years; and that’s the reason.”
“I wish I had known you seven years, Mr. Armstrong.”
“You have known me a hundred and seven.”
“Then I have a right to—”
“Poke my fire as much as you please.”
And as Mr. Armstrong said so, he poked his own chest,
to signify the symbolism of his words.
“Then I should like to know something of your
early history—something to account for
the fact that a man like you, at your time of life,
is only a curate.”
“I can do all that, and account for the pain
your cigar gives me, in one and the same story.”
I sat full of expectation.
“You won’t find me long-winded, I hope.”
“No fear of that. Begin directly.
I adjure you by our friendship of a hundred years.”
“My father was a clergyman before me; one of
those simple-hearted men who think that to be good
and kind is the first step towards doing God’s
work; but who are too modest, too ignorant, and sometimes
too indolent to aspire to any second step, or even
to inquire what the second step may be. The poor
in his parish loved him and preyed upon him. He
gave and gave, even after he had no more that he had
a right to give.
